Digital consent forms from the PDF you already use

Walk into the back room of a beauty or skin clinic and somewhere there is a folder of forms. A waxing consent. A peel consent with the longer health section. One for lash lifts, another for microneedling, plus the intake sheet every new client fills in. Each one started as a Word document and gets printed whenever the tray runs low. The signed copies live in a drawer.

Most of those forms are good. They have been tuned over years of real appointments, and the questions earn their place. What kept them on paper was the cost of moving them: rebuilding every field by hand in some form builder, one evening per form. Multiply that by the whole folder and the paper wins.

Bookatu shortens the job to one upload per form.

What one upload gets you

Open the Forms page and upload the file you already hand out at reception. It needs to be a text based PDF, the kind you get when you export from Word or Google Docs, rather than a photo of a printed page. Bookatu reads the text and builds a draft of the digital form, part by part.

• Questions become fields the client types an answer into.
• Tick boxes stay tick boxes, and a yes or no question becomes a simple choice between the two.
• A date of birth turns into a calendar picker, so nobody has to guess which date format you wanted.
• Consent statements, the lines a client signs against, become boxes that must be ticked before the form will go through.
• A signature field lands near the end, where people expect to sign.

A clean-up pass for the labels

Reading a PDF is never perfect. A label sometimes comes out with the line break in the wrong place, or a heading arrives in capitals that were only ever a font choice. There is an optional clean-up pass that tidies those labels for you, so the draft reads the way the paper form did. You still check everything yourself. The pass just means the checking is faster.

You review it, then attach it to the right services

Nothing goes live until you have read it. Open the draft, rename anything the reader got wrong, mark the fields that matter as required, and remove the question you stopped asking years ago. It is your form, arriving as a draft instead of a blank page.

Then tick the services that need it. The peel consent goes on the peel, the lash form goes on the lash services, and a client booking a simple file and polish is never asked for either. Each treatment carries its own paperwork, and only its own.

Filled in and signed on their phone

When a client books a service with a form attached, they are asked to complete it before the visit. Their details fill themselves in from their client record where that makes sense, so they are not retyping a name and phone number you already have. They work down the questions, tick the consent lines, then draw their signature in a box with a finger, the same way they would sign at a card machine. It happens at home the day before, not on a clipboard in your reception.

A form that took an afternoon to write should not take another afternoon to move.

The signed answers stay with the client

Every submitted form is kept with the client in your admin. Before a repeat peel you can open their record and see what they told you last time, with the drawn signature and the time it went in. If anyone ever asks whether a client agreed to something, the answer is two taps away instead of somewhere in a filing cabinet.

Editing it later is not a project

Forms change. A new product means a new allergy question, or your insurer asks you to add a line. You can edit any form whenever you like: a palette of field types sits beside the editor, and you can insert a new field at any point in the form, not just at the bottom. The new allergy question goes exactly where it belongs, next to the others.

If your reception folder holds five forms, this is an afternoon of uploads, not a week of rebuilding. Upload one, read the draft while the kettle boils, attach it, and move on to the next. The paper pile took years to grow. It does not take long to retire.